Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!THEP.LU.SE!magnus
From: magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: [] in Unix filenames
Message-ID: <9009191420.AA10971@thep.lu.se>
Date: 19 Sep 90 14:25:31 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 54

I was going to post the following question to comp.unix.shell, but I'm posting
via mail to ucbvax, and apparently ucbvax hasn't got an alias for that newsgroup
yet, so the letter just bounced. Hence I'm posting to comp.misc instead.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience this may cause all the non-Unix readers of
comp.misc. Please don't flame me, it's not my fault.

_________________________________________________________________________________


Today, I was asked to help a colleague with the following problem:

He'd used ftp to get some files from a VAX under VMS. Now, the VAX files were
in a subdirectory, so he wrote something like

mget [.subdir]*.* 

only to find that his Unix directory had a lot of files called things like

[.subdir]file1
[.subdir]file2

etc (about 20 of them), and that he couldn't access them (since the shell
catches the [] pair).

OK, I thought, I;ll just use the mved script published here some time
ago and do

mved \[*\]= =

(the = is a special wildcard recognized by mved - the command would mean
the same as
mv \[.subdir\]file1 file1
etc.)

But to my surprise, the shell just said "[: no such file or directory".

Actually, I couldn't find out *any* combination of backslashes and or quotes
that enabled me to get what I wanted (what [*] would have meant if [] weren't
special characters).

Finally, I gave up and wrote a C program to do the job.

Is there really no way of telling the shell that I mean
"all files that start with a [, followed by an arbitrary string,
followed by a ], etc? Or is this a bug in the shell (we're using
newcsh)?


Magnus Olsson		     	| \e+ 	   /_	      
Dept. of Theoretical Physics 	|  \  Z	  / q	      
University of Lund, Sweden	|   >----<	      
Internet: magnus@thep.lu.se	|  /	  \===== g    
Bitnet: THEPMO@SELDC52 		| /e-	   \q